'Wash Me Black Again': African Nationalism, the Indian - T-Space

285 Pages·2009·1.7 MB·English

‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu Natal,
1944-1960

by

Jon Soske

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of History

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jon Soske 2009
‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu
Natal, 1944-1960
Jon Soske
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of History
University of Toronto
2009
ABSTRACT
My dissertation combines a critical history of the Indian diaspora’s political and
intellectual impact on the development of African nationalism in South Africa with an
analysis of African/Indian racial dynamics in Natal. Beginning in the 1940s, tumultuous
debates among black intellectuals over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa played a
central role in the emergence of new and antagonistic conceptualizations of a South
African nation. The writings of Indian political figures (particularly Gandhi and Nehru)
and the Indian independence struggle had enormous influence on a generation of African
nationalists, but this impact was mediated in complex ways by the race and class
dynamics of Natal. During the 1930s and 40s, rapid and large-scale urbanization
generated a series of racially-mixed shantytowns surrounding Durban in which a largely
Gujarati and Hindi merchant and landlord class provided the ersatz urban infrastructure
utilized by both Tamil-speaking workers and Zulu migrants. In Indian-owned buses,
stores, and movie theatres, a racial hierarchy of Indian over African developed based on
the social grammars of property, relationship with land, family structure, and different
gender roles. In such circumstances, practices integral to maintaining diasporic
ii
identities—such as religious festivals, marriage, caste (jati), language, and even dress and
food—became signifiers of ranked status and perceived exclusion. Despite the
destruction of this urban landscape by forced removals beginning in the late 1950s, these
social relationships powerfully shaped African and Indian identities in Natal, the popular
memory of different communities, and the later politics of the anti-apartheid struggle.
Although a few recent publications have attempted to break down the bifurcation
that characterizes Natal’s historiography, the majority of academic writing on the
province employs a race-based framework that focuses on either Indians or Zulu-
speaking Africans. As a result, Natal’s African/Indian racial dynamic plays, at most, a
secondary role in most scholarship on the region. In turn, Natal itself generally appears in
histories of the anti-apartheid struggle as either an exception or a momentary interruption
to a “national” narrative overwhelmingly centered on events, organizations, and
individuals in the Transvaal. Rejecting a “race relations” approach that hypostatizes
coherent racial groups, my dissertation examines how segregationist policies, African and
Indian political organizations, and everyday social practices continuously reproduced an
“African/Indian divide” despite both the enormous heterogeneity of each group and the
quotidian intimacies of urban life. At the same time, it explores the ways in which this
division shaped the development of the anti-apartheid struggle in Natal and the
consequences of Natal’s politics for South Africa as a whole.

iii
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my thesis committee: Sean Hawkins, Rick Halpern, Bill
Freund, and Alissa Trotz—each one an exemplary mentor, collaborator, and friend. My
gratitude is inexpressible. I was also fortunate enough to have two generous and
encouraging external readers, Aisha Khan and Doris Bergen, both of whom contributed
their tremendous erudition to reading my work and, just as importantly, helped make the
final stages of finishing this dissertation enjoyable and lively. I would also like to thank
Ted Chamberlin for his limitless support, dependable council, and sagacious good humor.

While grounded in Kwa-Zulu Natal, this dissertation follows a number of
historical and methodological paths and I have benefited from the advice of many friends
and colleagues. Omar Badsha and Mark Hunter read most of the chapters and greatly
enhanced my knowledge of Natal’s history, while rescuing me from a number of small
errors. Many other people read draft chapters or offered their support at crucial points. In
particular, I would like to thank Marcus Rediker, Ritu Birla, Michelle Murphy, Melissa
Levin, Brian Beaton, Shivrang Setlur, Allison Schachter, Ken Kawashima, Thomas Blom
Hansen, Joseph Lelyveld, Sharad Chari, Luis Jacob, and Phiroze Vasunia. My mother, Jo
L. Soske, also read my dissertation with great insight and perspicacity. Kate Elizabeth
Creasey, my incredible and dedicated partner, was an endless source of resilience, critical
feedback, and practical assistance.

I would like to express my gratitude to the staffs at the University of Chicago
Special Collections Research Center; the William Cullen Library at University of the
Witwatersrand; and the Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

One of the greatest pleasures of this project was the generous welcome,
encouragement, and assistance that I received from academic colleagues and former
activists in South Africa, including Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall, Jeff Guy,
Elizabeth Gunner, Phillip Bonner, Vishnu Padayachee, David Hemson, Pamila Gupta,
Ronit Frenkel, Rehana Ebr.-Valley, Phyllis Naidoo, and Ismail Nagdee. As I was
completing this thesis, the incomparable Billy Nair—trade union organizer, Umkhonto
weSizwe operative, and Robben Island prisoner—passed away. After meeting together on
one occasion near Tongaat, Billy called me at six the next morning to expound on the
importance of the Freedom Charter, which he clearly believed that I had not yet grasped.
Billy would not have agreed with much that I argue in these pages, but his insights and
guidance were crucial.

While finishing this dissertation, I had the immense pleasure of working on a
collective intellectual and curatorial project that greatly enriched my thinking and writing,
the South-South series and art exhibition at New College and the Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery, University of Toronto. I wish to dedicate this thesis to my closest collaborators
of this past year: Hillina Seife, Tejpal S. Ajji, and Haema Sivanesan. Thank you, once
more, for your inspiring friendship and peerless intellectual companionship.

iv
Table of Contents

Introduction

Racial Consciousness and the Boundaries of Diaspora 2
Organization and Chapter Summaries 6
Sources, Language, and Racial Terminology 12

Chapter I Political Economy, Stereotype, and Urban Space

Introduction 20
The Intersection of Space and Stereotype 25
Stages of Urbanization 33
Grey Street and the “Indian” Store 39
Landlords and Housing 44
Sites Moving through Space: Buses 48
Other Sites: Bioscopes and Employers 52
Relationships and the Complexities of the Everyday 58
Chapter II African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora, 1945-1949

Introduction 62
Post-War Changes in the ANC and Indian Congresses 67
The NEUM, Xuma, and the Communist Party 74
The Passive Resistance Campaign and the United Nations 79
The Xuma-Dadoo-Naicker Pact 85
Backlash in the Natal ANC: The Ambiguities of Dependence 89
Backlash in the ANC: African Nationalism 94
Conclusion: An Irresolute Culmination 102

Chapter III The 1949 Anti-Indian Pogrom and the Crisis in the Natal ANC

Introduction 106
India on the World’s Stage 111
The 1949 Anti-Indian Pogrom 116
Initial Responses 123
The Debate between Ilanga Lase Natal and Indian Opinion 128
The Crisis in the Natal ANC 135
The Vicissitudes of A.W.G. Champion 141
Conclusion 144

v
Chapter IV Miscegenation, Feminine Virtue, and the Boundaries of Domestic
Space

Introduction 149
African Nationalism, Gender, and Urbanization 151
Africanist Christianity and Subaltern Patriarchy 159
Neighborhood, Family, Caste 164
Progress, Tradition, and the “Indian Woman” 170
The Problem of Miscegenation 176
Indian Domestic Space 185
Conclusion 192

Chapter V Remaking African Politics in the 1950s: The “Indian Question”
and the Origins of Non-Racial Nationalism

Introduction 195
A Partial Transformation: “The Fabulous Decade” of the 1950s 200
A New Nationalist Vision: the Beginnings of the Congress Alliance 210
Natal African Politics During the 1950s 224
The Africanist Faction, the Congress of the People, and the
Freedom Charter 239
Conclusion 259

Bibliography 263

vi
1

oh what lack of love
has caught me
lingering here

in a land where night
must come
to wash me black again

—Shabbir Banoobhai, Echoes of My Other Self, 1979
2

Introduction:
Racial Consciousness and the Boundaries of Diaspora

Arabs from Zanzibar and Bombay are also finding South Africa a fine field for
enterprise, and there is scarcely a town or village in which their stores are not seen.
Indeed the retail trade in native goods is almost wholly in their hands, to the chagrin
and grief of European merchants. Both Arabs and Indians are regarded by many as a
curse, but how to get rid of them is a question. Thus there will be an Asiatic as well as
African problem to be settled some day in this part of the world.1

—Rev. Josiah Tyler, Forty Years Among the Zulu, 1891.

If I were to tell you about things I know, it would take a very long time. Things
concerning us blacks and the Indians would take a long time to tell, as it is a long
story…2

—Josephine Hadebe, Domestic Worker, Durban, 1981.

The origins of Natal’s distinct racial politics lie, ultimately, in its 19th century history
as a British settler colony on the southeastern edge of the Indian Ocean.3 In the early decades
of European presence, the still formidable armies of the Zulu kingdom provided a significant
check on military expansion and most Africans within the colony maintained access to arable
land. Unable to compel African workers to accept their desired wages and terms of
employment, Natal’s sugar planters pressed the colonial administration to facilitate the
importation of Indian labor. From 1860 to 1911, over 150,000 indentured workers arrived in
Natal, largely from the Hindi-speaking Gangetic plains and the south Indian coast. In the mid
1870s, a second wave of South Asian migration began, the so-called “passengers,” who were
primarily Muslim Gujarati traders from western India (although this group included a

1 Rev. Josiah Tyler, Forty Years Among the Zulu (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1971), 186. “Arab” was
originally the term used to refer to Muslim Indian merchants, some of whom came to South Africa
via established trading networks in East Africa and Mauritius.
2 Interview with Josephine Hadebe by L. Mabaso, Durban, 26 April 1981, Killie Campbell Oral
History Project (KCAV 308), Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.
3 Today, the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal includes the former British colony and the historic area of
the Zulu kingdom. Despite its loss of territory, the Zulu kingdom remained independent until its loss
in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War. In 1887, Natal officially incorporated “Zululand” into the colony.
3
substantial Hindu minority as well). The Indian diaspora—or, more precisely, diasporas—did
not simply bring a South Asian population to Africa’s shores. It also shaped the racial,
political, and cultural dynamics of African life in the province and far beyond. Nevertheless,
the historiography of 20th century Natal is largely bifurcated between writing on “Indians”
and “Africans.”4
This dissertation examines the ways in which segregationist policies, African and
Indian political organizations, and everyday social practices continuously reproduced an
African/Indian racial divide despite the heterogeneity of each group and the quotidian
intimacies of urban life. At the same time, it explores the influence of this division on the
anti-apartheid struggle in Natal and the consequences of Natal’s racial dynamics for African
politics throughout South Africa. Although less than 2 percent of South Africa’s population
in 1951, the Indian minority was both concentrated in Natal and the most urbanized of all
South Africa’s groups. In 1960, 49 percent of South Africa’s Indians lived in Natal’s largest
city, Durban, and Indians constituted 35 percent of its total residents.5 Natal is also home to
the majority of isiZulu speakers, who not only dominate the province numerically, but are
heirs to one of the most powerful and brutal histories of resistance and repression in southern
Africa. In part due to colonial policies of governance and later apartheid structures, different
forms of Zulu and Indian nationalism—both within and outside of historic organizations like
the ANC and the Natal Indian Congress (NIC)—profoundly influenced the region’s political,
intellectual, and cultural landscapes for much of the 20th Century. These regional political

4 For a discussion of this bifurcation in the historiographies of both South Africa and the Indian
Ocean, see Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of
Transnationalism for the Global South—Literary and Cultural Perspectives,” Social Dynamics 33,
no. 2 (2007), 3–32. I discuss the historiography of Natal and the Indian population in South Africa
further in the chapters that follow.
5 T. J. D. Fair and N. Manfred Shaffer, “Population Patterns and Policies in South Africa, 1951-
1960,” Economic Geography 40, no. 3 (July 1964), 268.
4
and intellectual traditions not only differentiated the province from the rest of South Africa,
but they have at times had a major impact on the Transvaal (today’s Gauteng), the center of
South Africa’s industrial revolution and African political life.
In the following pages, I explore the interlacing histories of the Indian diaspora and
the development of African nationalist politics from the founding of the ANC Youth League
in 1944 to the banning of the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in March 1960. I
analyze the dominant set of racial dynamics that emerged in urban Natal, particularly
Durban, during the late 1930s and early 40s and then explore their ramifications for African
politics in both that province and the Transvaal (the location of the national ANC leadership).
At the same time, I examine a series of related debates over the national question in South
Africa and the political role of “the Indian.” By reading intellectual history against the grain
of daily life, this dissertation explores the complicated interactions between African politics,
the transnational circulation of discourses, and local power relations embedded within a
variety of social, economic, and political structures. It also tries to demonstrate the empirical
and conceptual limitations of any history of South Africa during this period that is organized
along racial or provincial lines. At least in the South African context, historians of the Indian
diaspora must go further than situating “Indian identity” in relationship to its various others:
an approach that inscribes the boundaries established and policed by community nationalism
in the very framing of historical analysis. Rather, the concept of diaspora needs to be
rethought according to a problematic that simultaneously traverses racial categories and
excavates the different sites of their reproduction.6

6 Some recent interventions in the field of Indian diaspora studies have been quite critical of the
scholarship’s overall failure to situate the phenomena of diaspora within broader political and social
contexts. As Sunil Amrith writes: “There is a tendency in the literature … to paint a very inward-
looking picture of diasporic communities isolated from contact with others, and fixated upon